Battle of Dogger Bank (1915)

The Battle of Dogger Bank was a naval battle fought in the North Sea on 24 January 1915 during World War I. The British Grand Fleet met the German High Seas Fleet in battle after ambushing Admiral Franz von Hipper's fleet, and the British sunk the German armored cruiser Blucher, winning a slight victory over the Imperial German Navy.

Background
Britain's Royal Navy had experienced a mixed start to the war in 1914, with a number of successes offset by humiliating setbacks.In August 1914, Britain made the mistake of allowing the German warships SMS Goeben and SMS Breslau to sail to Constantinople, helping to bring Turkey into the war on the German side. Britain had also lost ships to German submarines and mines and suffered a defeat in the Pacific at Coronel in November. For the British public, the worst incident came on 16 December when German battlecruisers shelled towns on the east coast of England.

The British had recorded victories at Heligoland Bight in the North Sea on 28 August 1914 and at the Battle of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic on 8 December. Germany remained under British naval blockade and its High Seas Fleet was unable to leave port for fear of destruction by the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet.

Battle
German naval strategy was built on the hope of eroding Britain's naval superiority through piecemeal destruction of warships, especially by mines and submarines. To avoid this, the Royal Navy did not attempt a "close blockade" of the German coast, which would have put British ships at risk, but used its control of the exits from the North Sea (around Scotland in the north) to maintain a "distant blockade" of Germany.

In principle, this strategy left the German surface fleet free to sortie into the North Sea at will. However, if German warships left port, the Royal Navy aimed to drive them back home or, preferably, destroy them. The British Admiralty had a secret weapon in this cat-and-mouse game. Naval intelligence under Admiral Reginald "Blinker" Hall had obtained German naval code books and set up listening posts to monitor the radio traffic of German ships. By 1915, the code breakers in Hall's Room 40 at the Admiralty in London could warn of a sortie before the German ships had left port.

German aims
On 23 January 1915, Vice Admiral Franz von Hipper, who had led a raid on English coastal towns in December, was ordered to take his fleet into the North Sea to attack British trawlers and patrol boats at Dogger Bank, a shallow area 62 miles off England's east coast. Hipper had three battle cruisers - his flagship SMS Seydlitz leading Moltke and Derfflinger - plus destroyers and light cruisers. Battlecruisers were the starts of naval warfare, with guns as heavy as those on battleships but with more speed. When Room 40 informed the Admiralty that Hipper was setting to sea, Vice Admiral David Beatty was ordered to lead the Royal Navy's response. Leaving the Scottish port of Rosyth, he steamed south with five battlecruisers - his flagship HMS Lion leading Tiger, Princess Royal, Indomitable, and New Zealand - joining up with light cruisers and destroyers at Harwich. Shortly after 7:00 AM on 24 January, the outlying ships of the opposing forces exchanged fire. Hipper quickly realized he had fallen into a trap and turned for home at full speed. Beatty led the chase in the fast-moving Lion, with his other battlecruisers trying to keep up. Leading the German fleet on board the Seydlitz, Hipper was hampered by the need to keep in touch with his slower ships, especially the out-of-date armored cruiser Blucher. Gaining on the Germans, the British battelcruisers opened fire shortly before 9:00 AM. The range was extreme - more than 11 miles - and the ships were moving at maximum speed, so hits were infrequent. At 9:43 AM, the Lion landed the first major blow, exploding Seydlitz's two aft turrets with an armor-penetrating shell. More than 160 men were killed, and a worse disaster was averted only through the heroism of a German sailor, Wilhelm Heidkamp, who flooded the magazines to protect them from fire. Blucher also took a battering and fell farther behind the rest of the German force.

Missed opportunity
The British, however, failed to distribute their fire evenly between the German ships. The battlecruisers Moltke and Derfflinger were untouched, and as the range shortened, their shells hit the Lion with increasing frequency. By 10:45, Beatty's flagship was so battered it came to a stop. The battlecruiser Tiger was also badly damaged.

From the British point of view, the battle that had opened so promisingly degenerated into a mess. Beatty first ordered an unnecessary turn to avoid a nonexistent U-boat and then, using flag signals instead of radio, failed to convey his order for the pursuit to be resumed with all speed. Instead, Beatty's subordinates concentrated the fire of their four battlecruisers on the Blucher, which Hipper had resolved to abandon to its fate. The Blucher finally capsized and sank, while Hipper led his battlecruisers safely back to port. The crippled Lion was towed back to Rosyth, where it received a hero's wlecome. The battle had, after all, been a demonstration of British naval strength. But Beatty had fumbled an opportunity to inflict a crushing defeat on the German navy.

Aftermath
The British and German navies drew very different conclusions from their experience of the Battle of Dogger Bank. Kaiser Wilhelm II was appalled by the risk that had been taken with his precious warships and banned further sorties, not relenting until the following year. The commander of the German High Seas Fleet, Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl, was replaced by Hugo von Pohl, who in February 1917 gave the order to adopt unrestricted submarine warfare against Allied shipping. To counter superior German gunnery, the British concluded they must increase their rate of fire at the expense of safety procedures. This led to many deaths at the Battle of Jutland.